Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 27 Sep 1999 04:32:07 -0700 | From | Brian Swetland <> | Subject | Re: [Q]: Linux and real device drivers |
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[David Weinehall <tao@acc.umu.se>] > > I hope not! That's downright embarassing. > > Sure, but it's more embarassing to get into the situation Microsoft has > with an API that never is obsoleted, because someone might still run old > drivers...
There's a world of difference between NEVER changing the driver API (dragging the ball and chain of indefinate backward compatibility) and avoiding needlessly breaking things :-)
One *could* perhaps instead of matching modules against the kernel using the kernel version, match them using an api_version that's updated when the driver APIs change.
Of course this goes back to the whole issue of driver docs -- if the APIs driver writers use aren't documented it's somewhat hard to determine when they change.
Writing drivers is a lot easier when you can glance over the docs and see what functionality the kernel provides. Of course the nice thing about open source is if you're curious about how or why these things work you can dig into the sources and see how they're implemented, rather than trusting the evil closed-source OS vendor to tell the truth and/or get it right. If I can get up-to-date docs, I can write drivers a lot faster without having to examine a bunch of other drivers and kernel source to try to put together a picture of How It All Works(tm).
I'm a bit perplexed at the "It should be hard to install new drivers so that the users will learn stuff" and "It should be hard to write drivers so that developers will learn stuff" attitudes. That the kernel sources are there for anyone to look at, learn from, and contribute too is very nice. To force everyone to wade through 'em just because "they should" seems to be a bit much. I'm not even going to touch the "Documentation will lead to poor code" argument -- that's just insane :-)
All, of course, in my humble opinion,
Brian
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